So it goes...

I am having one of those weird weeks where everything is beautiful to me.  And I am pretty sure this is not normal. Monday brought another week of writing class, which in all honesty makes every Monday more bearable. I am a total writing geek and I don't know how to explain this group to you any better than to say that they are an eclectic mix of crazy geniuses. One woman finished her novel this week and when we heard the ending, we shot her down. It wasn't in a critical way, but rather a, "Nope, you can't end it that way" way. This is what we do to people. We tell them how to be better. A better writer, a better editor, and eventually a better author.  In that same class, another guy said he was leaving the class to go onto the "book writing" class on Thursday night. While I'll miss his time travel science fiction, I applaud that he is taking his work to the next level.  He is one of those writers you just know will make it someday. His w...

It occurred to me that for all the mention of my writing and my book, I've never disclosed much about what Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir  is about, or how it came to be. I know I've addressed the process and lamented about my struggles with it, but I've never really prepared an elevator talk outlining what the book is about. Part of me just assumed that from the title, people could figure it out for themselves. Another part of me thought that I should keep it secret, or to myself, so that the book would be somehow more engaging or self-revealing to people when they read it. Neither of these are good assumptions to make from a marketing standpoint. People don't get interested by "mystique". So, I'll try and talk a little about the book without giving it all away. The book actually was never intended to be a book at all, I'll start with that. In 2005, I enrolled in a class called Writing from Your Life. It was a class offered through the City...